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Jacques Louis Vidal: I’d like to start our little Q&A by
Justin Lieberman: Don’t play like you don’t know how we roll
JV: I think that raises a larger question—how could wood glue |
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Jacques Louis Vidal is a Chicago-based artist and Justin Lieberman is a New York–based artist. This conversation took place on the occasion of Vidal’s New York solo debut, Wood Folks Is Good Folks, at SUNDAY.
Jacques Louis Vidal: I’d like to start our little Q&A by thanking you Justin, for raising my child, as if it were your own.
Justin Lieberman: Don’t play like you don’t know how we roll Jacques. I always suspected something. After all, how could I possibly have fathered a child made entirely out of wood glue?
JV: I think that raises a larger question—how could wood glue result in anything except an ultimately flawed rendering? Even the most skilled of woodsmen couldn’t hope to create something that could be truly mistaken as human.
JL: In a way you are like Gepetto, Dr. Frankenstein, or the maker of the Golem. Do you ever feel threatened by your creations? Or wood (ha ha) you say you have a more fatherly attitude towards them?
JV: I’m like an absentee father, but on the other hand, I look at my works like I’m the only friend they have in the world, like I’m running some kind of orphanage for "wayward forms.” I have to be careful though; generally if I’m allowed alone with anything too long, I’ll ruin it. It reminds me of the saying in which every child is a perfect artist. But in reality they need to have a teacher there to take the drawing away at a certain point. That’s why I make sketches, so that I’ll know when to put a lid on the art. It’s good to set parameters. Especially when you’re trying to create disorder.
JL: I always heard that saying in reference to monkeys instead of children. Although I guess they are not that different. I don’t see what you do as disorder per se. I just see the order in your work coming from what Mike Kelley calls "minor histories.” Formal systems that reside outside of an institutional history of art. Visionary architecture, radical theater, waxwork museums like Madame Tussaud’s, and the "creative efforts" of people in blue-collar industries, like the metal man welded out of scrap on top of the auto garage by my studio. I thought your appreciation of that piece was really astute.
JV: It’s as though everyone at the garage was sitting around, and one guy said, "You guys wanna make a little man out of all the mufflers we got last week?" I try to be employed by what I make. I’ll ask myself a question like, "If I worked in a wooden mannequin factory, what would I do today?" and then, invariably I’ll usually ask myself "what if I worked the graveyard shift?" My work is rooted in a pretty conventional idea of theater, with drawings as sets and sculpture as props. Any one piece has the potential to be used and reused for completely different purposes. Although I worry that recycling objects and mixing meanings sometimes takes away the resoluteness of a piece. It takes away some of its dignity.
J
L: Your work has never struck me as being overly concerned with austerity or permanence. It’s very American that way. But conventional theater? You’ve got to be kidding. Your performances are about as off-Broadway as it gets. How do the sculptures/drawings drive the performances or vice-versa?
JV: I think that daily life is the driving force behind all of my work, and in the case of this show in particular; loneliness feeds into these performances, sculptural objects, and drawings. I got sucked into signing up for a Five-DVDs-a-month deal because the ad said I would get a free laptop, and then once I had signed all the papers all I got was Eurotrip: Unrated Version in the mail, and I felt lonely and distrustful. I went to the post office to try and mail it back, and it was closed for some holiday I’d never even heard of…and I felt even lower. Finding a solution in all that, a way out of a really deep sinkhole by getting in even deeper always seems to be the way to go. Sliding through all the difficulty and grabbing in the dark. I make performances and sculptures and drawings of people and things I meet along the dark, lonely road of the internet, and I find I trust these things more if I can make them in real life.
JL: That was really weird. I don’t even know what that meant. Are you saying the work is about taking things from the fictional, virtual space of the internet and giving them a physical presence? I thought that the web was mostly a tool in your work. It’s something artists of an earlier generation completely exoticized. Like in the 01010101 and Bitstreams shows from a few years back. You’re part of a generation of artists who take the Internet for granted, like Ben Jones or Brian Bress. And it seems like there is a certain irony or perversity in your treatment of it as subject matter.
JV: I do take most of it for granted, even the idea that it’s a nonphysical space. I meet images, pop-up windows, people, and ideas with equal skepticism. I try to formalize my experience of the Internet like a road I’m driving down. Signs keep coming up telling you where you are, or where you are going, or to watch out for danger. I remember a scene from the movie Weird Science in which the two main characters have to travel through their PC down a "cyber track" to reach a top secret government computer capable of creating the woman of their dreams. They have to reach an underworld "underworld." Or in Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure, when Pee-Wee is driving down a road at night and the signs keep getting wackier and wackier, and then they fall into a secret tunnel. The internet is the catalyst for the more social aspects of what I’m doing. It’s a grab bag that I can mix and match an endless stream of forms from.
JL: The under-underworld and its social aspects remind me of sub-subculture, the kind of things Cameron Jamie documents in his work. But he avoids the internet almost conspicuously. What do you think the effect of the internet on that kind of culture is?
JV: Well, I think, Wood Folks is Good Folks contains a kind of skepticism of new technology. I read proclamations like "The internet is changing the shape of the way we interact." and "The internet creates an instant dialogue across cultural and political boundaries that is changing the way we organize time," and I am immediately suspicious. Creating your heart’s desire out of wood is the same (and the opposite) as going online to meet "your perfect match" or looking or the website that "brings it all into focus.” I identify with people trying to do this, but I see it as a continuation of timeless human emotions: loneliness, idealism, and, hopefully, humor.
